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It’s October, so you know what that means. Here’s one of the most popular pieces from the Archives:

October is Dwarfism Awareness Month. This means you should be aware of the facts and experiences regarding people with dwarfism for the next 25 days. Then you can stop and go back to life as usual.

We have picked this month because it has Halloween in it. This way we can ensure that no one will offend us through drunkenness or choice of costume. This plan is foolproof.

We realize that October is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month, LGBT History Month, and Polish-American Heritage Month. Given that a month can handle only one minority at a time, we urge you to side with us. I myself picked my dwarfism over my Polish heritage and I promise you, the choice was easy. Anyone who chooses otherwise is a self-hating dwarf and the reason why we haven’t had a dwarf president yet.

In order to become Aware Of Dwarfism (A.O.D.), you can read up on it under the FAQ’s, read about some of my dwarfish opinions here or here or here, or consider any one of the following facts:

To begin with, Peter Dinklage is the best dwarf. Everyone agrees on this.

We love being photographed on the street. (Thank god for camera phones!) It is every dwarf’s dream to end up on Tumblr or Instagram someday. Either that or in a Peter Jackson film.

It is true that all dwarfs are magical. But especially homosexuals with achondroplasia. They are dwarf fairies.

We love it when you ask about Lord of the Rings. Please keep asking us about Lord of the Rings. We’re currently in fierce competition with New Zealanders over who gets the most LOTR questions.

Mini-Me is even better. It is the height of originality. We can’t get enough of it.

Please keep telling us that we must be really good at hide-and-seek. We don’t quite believe it yet, so your pointing it out is helpful.

Tossing a dwarf will make you more of a man. This has been scientifically proven by evolutionary biologists.

Adding a dwarf or two to your fantasy/cabaret/oddity story will make you a sophisticated artist. In his little known essay “L’art mystérieux du nain,” Toulouse-Lautrec wrote that World War II would have been prevented had there been more dwarf figures in 1930s song and film. (Terry Gilliam and Amanda Palmer are currently in a bidding war over the rights to the essay.)

In China and Russia and other evil countries, limb-lengthening is a cruel form of torture. In America, limb-lengthening is a miracle.

Liberals say a dwarf who has had limb-lengthening is destroying the dwarf community. Conservatives say a dwarf who has not had limb-lengthening is destroying their own future. Realists point out that dwarfs are destructive by nature.

Indeed, there are three dwarf personality types: belligerent, cute or nefarious. That is all. If you have met a dwarf who is contemplative or sarcastic or boring, that person is a not a dwarf. He is a fraud. I mean frawd.

Garden gnomes are frawds.

Midgets are left-handed dwarfs. Munchkins are elves in disguise. Oompa-Loompas are related to Pygmies, but less racist, so when in doubt, say Oompa-Loompas.

Dwarfs are happy to answer any of your questions about their sex lives. Just remember that if you don’t laugh at some point, we will be offended.

Dwarfs cannot have normal children. Like our great-great-great grandfather Rumplestiltskin, we are always on the lookout for normal children to kidnap. If you see a dwarf with normal children, contact the local authorities immediately.

Remember these facts and you will be officially A.O.D., which means no one has the right to accuse you of being insensitive from here on in. Better yet, you can recite these facts at dinner parties and lecture your friends with your newfound expertise. It is very important to be the expert on a subject at a dinner party. It proves you are a grown-up.

It is also important to spend as much time as possible this month making up height puns. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a challenge as many of the best puns have already been taken: Thinking Big; Don’t Sell Yourself Short; Even Dwarfs Started Off Small; Little People Big World; In Our Hearts We Were Giants. I suggest aiming for slightly more abstract sayings like, “All dwarfs have high voices. Ironic, isn’t it?” But make sure you say “high” emphatically or it will be lost on people. (Oh, and I’ve found that saying, “Achondro -paper or -plastic?” confuses most supermarket cashiers.)

And finally, sometimes it’s spelled “dwarfs” and sometimes it’s spelled “dwarves.” We get to decide. It’s the best part about being a dwarf.

German author and Nobel laureate Günter Grass passed away this week. His most celebrated work, The Tin Drum, is the story of a German boy living before, during and after the Nazi era, who decides he does not want to join the preposterously nonsensical world of adults and therefore is determined to stop growing. He throws himself down the stairs and successfully stunts his growth. Later he meets a dwarf circus performer named Bebra and joins up with him, performing on the Western front for German officers and eventually having an affair with Bebra’s lover, who also has dwarfism. The book, which involves far more storylines than I have adumbrated here, has justly earned nearly universal praise, and the 1979 film adaptation won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film and the grand prize at Cannes.

The Tin Drum is a story of magical realism that instrumentalizes dwarfism in a complex way. “Our kind must never sit in the audience,” says Bebra, “Our kind must perform and run the show or the others will run us. The others are coming. They will occupy the fairgrounds. They will stage torchlight parades, build rostrums, fill the rostrums, and from those rostrums preach our destruction.” These statements are loaded, ominously referencing dwarf entertainers like the Ovitz family who were being treated like lab rats by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz. Günter Grass came to prominence as a leading voice in the Vergangenheitsbewältigung movement that broke the silence about his country’s crimes. Any failure to illustrate the reality of dwarfs during the Holocaust years echoes the many tales of Medieval and Early Modern courts that portray dwarf servants and jesters merely as part of the scenery while saying nothing about the fact that these people were, to put it bluntly, slaves traded among the aristocracy, sometimes in cages.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hopfrog,” written in 1849, is one of the few tales to allude to these human rights abuses. In 1992, the PBS American Playhouse program adapted the story as Fool’s Fire. (I was invited to audition for the part of the protagonist’s little sister. My acting career ended thereafter.) Director Julie Taymore made the decision to portray the average-sized characters in monster-like masks and the dwarf characters without.

This make-up treatment was the precise opposite of how the directors of the Harry Potter films would later chose to portray dwarf actor Warwick Davis’s goblin characters alongside the humans.In addition to miserly goblins and slave-like elves, the Harry Potter books include dwarf characters. They are mentioned in passing as “raucous dwarfs” in a pub in the third book and reinforce the servant trope when they are dressed up like Cupid and sent through the school delivering valentines in the second book. One must wonder why the author felt the need to include them at all. They represent, if anything, yet another point at which J.K. Rowling’s chef d’oeuvre fails to be nearly as progressive as she seems to think it is.

It’s never fun to get upset about all this. Size can be a genuinely magical idea worth playing with (as seen above). But genuine upset tends to grow the longer it goes unacknowledged. In college I took a writing workshop where we were encouraged to write about sensitive, taboo, and offensive words. The N-word and the C-word were brought up almost immediately, and I decided to demand a debate about the M-word for dwarfs. One of my classmates pointed out, “The problem with rude stuff said about dwarfs is that it doesn’t strike us as offensive or controversial. It strikes us as funny.”

The Tin Drum is all about humanity and employs absurdist characters and events for harrowing, not hilarious effects. It is a complex novel, as is Stones from the River, a German-American war story I am inclined to prefer because the protagonist is a non-magical dwarf. After being arrested for taking a crack at the swatstika, she is hauled before a judge who reminds her that she can’t afford to speak out against Nazism when people like her are prime targets for eugenics researchers.

While The Tin Drum did not invent the idea of comparing children and dwarfs, it would be nice were it the only example of it. This has hardly been the case. It’s a gag nearly every person with dwarfism has heard for the umpteenth time. The Simpsons have done it. The brilliant comedy team Mitchell and Webb have done it. After my third-grade class watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, my teacher pointed out—or perhaps conceded—that the Oompa-Loompas were portrayed by people who had dwarfism just like I did. One of my classmates said, “Oh no, they might have just have been children.”I looked at her cock-eyed, thinking, How can you not tell a dwarf from a child?

The fate of the main character in the crime-comedy In Bruges hinges on the villain mistaking a dwarf’s corpse for that of a child. The joke already appears earlier in the film, when the dwarf in question explains that he’s been hired to appear in a school boy’s uniform in a cinematic dream sequence and rolls his eyes at it. This sort of we-make-the-joke-but-also-make-fun-of-it-so-that-makes-okay schtick is reminiscent of Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short, of which one critic at The Quietus aptly said:

Perhaps this is some triple-axle attempt at post-post-postmodern irony, an ultra-sophisticated comedic in-joke that has tied itself up in such obscure knots it only seems crass to the un-knowing, the obtuse. Well, that’d be me because from where I’m sitting it looks like we’re supposed to be laughing at a guy for being too short.

It’s unfortunate because I really love In Bruges. Just as I love Willy Wonka and That Mitchell and Webb Look. Call it cynical, call it ironic, call it hilarious, but in these cases and so many others, deleting the dwarf characters would have allowed me to enjoy myself completely.

Time for another break from the tough stuff. I want to talk about Disney. (In earnest, mind you. As always.) I just saw Pixar’s Brave and no, I’m not going to write about her feminism—or the ludicrous musings about her lesbianism—or the radical imperfectness of her eyebrows. What pleased me most about this film was its break from the Broadway tradition that has been dominating—dare I say strangling—animated cinema for decades. Throughout my childhood, Disney and their competitors would take you around the world with Alan Menken and his endless supply of wide-mouthed Middle American show tunes as your guide. The main characters’ accents ranged from Beverly Hills to Burbank.

Like The Princess and the Frog, Brave has the guts to feature songs, accents, and expressions native to the story’s setting. And it’s about time. The Broadway model has its merits, but it can start to feel like overkill when it forbids any trace of historical or foreign flavor. When it comes to their family films, Hollywood has traditionally handled their American audiences like cultural infants. There conventional wisdom asserts that any voice that doesn’t immediately evoke baseball and apple pie risks obliterating our ability to empathize. Only “artsy” films for grown-ups like Brokeback Mountain or Capote dare to let the dialect match the backdrop. Hence our heroes Aladdin and Belle and Ariel and Simba and Esmeralda, who all sound like they went to school with the cast of Saved by the Bell. As The New York Times observed in 1997, the closest the actors in Anastasia ever came to St. Petersburg was Pasadena. A character speaking the Queen’s English has been permitted with some regularity, but if they’re not Julie Andrews, they’re probably the villain or the butler.

Paradoxically, these animated family films set in far off lands usually feature one odd character who does speak with a local accent. So is this proof we can catch words pronounced differently, or does it not matter what Token Foreigner says because his character is inconsequential? Beauty and the Beast lets one or two sidekicks babble, “Ooo la la!” and “Sacre bleu !” but pretty much leaves the plot exposition up to everyone else. In Aladdin, the Arabic accent belongs only to the characters with the fewest lines, such as the merchant—who sings the racist song that was later edited—and Gazeem the thief, who dies before the end of Scene One. And by the way, I haven’t been able to find anyone in The Little Mermaid who sounds Danish, under the sea or above.

Not only does Brave inject its lines with a kick-ass charisma brought on by Scottish brogue, but most of its voice actors—with the exception of Emma Thompson and Julie Walters—are actually, truly, veritably from Scotland. Traditionally, the Token Foreigner in a children’s film has been provided by an American actor putting on a stereotypical accent. (Kelsey Grammer as a Russian aristocrat, Jerry Orbach as a French candlestick… ) The ability to imitate an accent is a great skill for both an actor and an interpreter, but it can easily go horribly wrong without anyone in charge of the film noticing. The fact that Dick van Dyke got away with his impression of Cockney in Mary Poppins suggests that U.S. film critics of the time had pretty low standards. Meryl Streep has been famously lauded for her ability to sound authentically Italian, Polish, and British, but almost none of those singing her praises are Italian, Polish, or British. Her portrayals may very well be accurate, but ever since Mary Poppins, Americans have a bit of a reputation for being too easily fooled. My Nordic partner always rolls his eyes and shakes his head at the Seinfeld episode that tried to pass off this accent as Finnish:

This is not to say that Americans are the only ones who can’t tell Finnish from gibberish. I’ve met plenty of French people who think Japanese sounds like that pathetically generic “Ching-chong-chang!” And Brits who have claimed—a little arrogantly—that the U.S. does not have as many dialects or accents as the U.K. Ethnologue cites 176 living languages in the U.S. compared to the U.K.’s 12. Great Britain and Northern Ireland may contain more dialects—though I would bet their dialects are fewer in number while boasting more speakers per dialect—but this begs the philosophical question of what separates a dialect from a language. The joke among linguists goes, “A language has an army and a navy.”

Every culture tends toward simplistic views of other cultures. When you begin to type “Brave Pixar” into Google, you get the apparently popular question, “Brave Pixar Irish or Scottish?” Anyone outside of the Celtic-speaking regions could be asking this question.

I’m sure Brave is still rife with Scottish stereotypes that are more craved by Hollywood than are authentic. And the ancient clans of the Highlands most likely sounded nothing like Billy Connolly or Craig Ferguson. But it is nice to see the filmmakers trust us enough to handle protagonists who do not speak exactly like the average American moviegoer. After all, what is the point to hearing stories from far off lands if it’s not to hear things we may not have heard before? And the more we are exposed to different authentic accents, the more likely we are to realize that every one of us has one. And that somewhere, someone is smiling at the way we talk.

Eeeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers let him go… That’s the version I learned. My British friends caught a fishy by the toe. My mother’s generation caught a n***** by the toe. Were they wrong to alter it for us?

Last week I applauded The Observer’s decision to remove a childish, poorly argued opinion piece from its website on the grounds that it did not meet their standards for style, while others hollered, “Censorship!” This week, the German media is abuzz with its own debate over publishing standards as Thienemann Verlag has announced its decision to replace racist terms—such as “die Neger-Prinzessin”—in certain classic children’s books. To which some are saying, Finally, while others are saying, Censorship! And some are saying, The N-word isn’t racist!

This debate is older than the civil rights movement. Pull up reviews of The Five Chinese Brothers on GoodReads and you’ll find nostalgic fans shouting, “Book burners!” at anyone who criticizes the illustrations. The problem with this debate is that it usually attracts extreme narrow-mindedness on both sides.

Some progressive activists do mistake witch hunting for spreading diversity awareness. A few years ago feminist author Chris Lynch drew angry reactions from some women’s rights groups who demanded he change the name of his young adult series The He-Man Women-Haters Club. But the books pick apart the machismo boys learn from pop culture and their fathers. The mentality adopted by Lynch’s critics was so blunt that they couldn’t tell an opponent from an ally. If the equality debate ends at what words are okay and which aren’t, regardless of context, it has failed. Miserably.

But too many activists opposed to censorship demonstrate none of the openness and subtlety that are the building blocks of free thought and artistic integrity, which they purport to defend. After reading Fahrenheit 451, an unparalleled tribute to the majesty of books, I got snagged in the inanity of Ray Bradbury’s hysterical afterword. He begins by citing an editor who asked if he could put more female characters in The Martian Chronicles:

A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I ‘do them over’? … How did I react to all of the above? … By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell. The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. Every minority… feels it has the will, the reason, the right to douse the kerosene, light the fuse… For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my play, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters.

That he dared them to back off and write their own books was a productive challenge, but his arrogance in damning them all to hell did not suggest he ever intended to read what they wrote. (If he truly believed all art should be borne out of one person’s imagination alone, unscathed by anyone’s suggestions for improvement along the way, then he was probably the only writer in human history who never once accepted advice.) This is not dialogue. This is not open debate. This is accusing your opponents of oppression in order to silence them. This is failing to discern between book-burning and social critique.

Censorship is a serious issue. Berlin’s memorial to the Nazi book-burning of 1933 is a window into an empty library. It bears a plaque that reads, “Those who are capable of burning books are capable of burning people.” No one should ever call for legally prohibiting the publication, sale, or existence of any sort of text if speech is to remain truly free. Libraries should offer the public all they can eat and more. But every publisher of children’s books should also be free to reject or revise what they release based on their own educational theories. No one on earth believes any child of any age should read absolutely anything. Releasing less hurtful editions of a story—while maintaining the right to publish the original—is not always censorship. Indeed, automatically assuming it is betrays the sort of narrow-mindedness typical of censors.

The leave-greatness-untouched argument ignores how many well-known stories have been severely distorted over time. In the unadulterated Cinderella, the ugly stepsisters chop off pieces of their own feet to force them into the glass slipper. The prince is fooled until he notices the slipper overflowing with blood. Snow White forces the Evil Queen to dance in a pair of hot-iron shoes at her wedding until she drops dead. As for Sleeping Beauty, do you think the medieval prince only kissed her as she slept? It makes old-fashioned Disney look like a flaming liberal. These violent versions are still around, but a lack of demand has nudged them out of the spotlight. I wish the same fate upon racist versions of old children’s books.

Of course, context is everything, and certain words can have many meanings. Mark Twain used the N-word in Huckleberry Finn to portray a complex, admirable character who discredits racism and slavery. But the N-word as it is used by Otfried Preußler—and Astrid Lindgren, and so many other white storytellers of the early and mid-20th century—evokes the colonialist stereotype of the savage who is either happy-go-lucky or bloodthirsty. (In the words of Cracked.com, “Lesson Learned: What’s the deal with Africans? If they’re not trying to eat it or throw a spear at it, they’re worshiping it as some sort of tribal deity, am I right?”) Of course it’s absurd to think that every kid will automatically turn racist from reading this, but it’s also naïve to think such caricatures have no influence. If childhood stories had no bearing on readers’ perceptions of minorities, then no one would ever promote children’s books that celebrate diversity.

While I don’t object to students seeing racism or sexism or ableism in books, I strongly object to their being subjected to it before they’ve had any other exposure to more realistic depictions of the people these ideas dehumanize. Psychologist Hartmut Kasten argues in the left-leaning newspaper Die Zeit that children ages four and up can read and should “learn that there are people with different skin colors, learn what we used to call them, what we call them today, and that there is such a thing as prejudice.” But is it necessary when first introducing a child to someone who looks different to immediately hand them all the historical baggage of racism, too? Doesn’t that suggest to them that people with different skin colors are always controversial? Prejudice can spring from seeing a minority constantly portrayed either as a stereotype or as a victim of stereotyping.

Prof. Kasten argues that expunging orientalism and other exotic tropes from children’s literature “destroys the imagination.” But must the exotic always be colonialist just because that’s our tradition? It is traditional in the Netherlands for St. Nicholas to be accompanied by a mischievous African man named Black Pete. Some say he is supposed to be St. Nicholas’s servant, others say he is his slave. For decades, white performers have donned blackface to portray him. In recent years, some have replaced the blackface with multi-colored face paints, renaming the character “Rainbow Pete.” This approach has long been popular in Suriname, a former Dutch colony with predominantly black citizenry. Many are appalled to see an old tradition changed, but the St. Nicholas/Santa Claus/Kris Kringle/Father Christmas/Father Frost myth has been constantly evolving over time, forever an amalgam of various cultural influences. Our nostalgia does not like us to admit this, but as said before, nostalgia is rarely honest, often revisionist. And could Prof. Kasten argue that rainbow people are less imaginative than black slaves?

And if children’s creativity is nurtured by stories from long ago in far off lands, why not make more of an effort to offer tales originating from those lands? Indeed, in my workshops about teaching diversity awareness in pre-school, I promote translated folk tales and fairy tales such as Sense Pass King and Children of the Dragon to be read alongside Cinderella and Snow White.

The best way to combat uncreative stereotypes is to flood children’s libraries with beautiful stories that go deeper. My hero Judy Blume agrees. She is the most challenged author of all time in the United States. Her brilliant books question everything from racism to religion to budding sexuality. Most of her loudest critics usually argue that children under the age of 18 should never read about masturbation or wet dreams, despite how many 10-year-olds are already wise to it. Blume wants parents who object to her stories to engage their children in discussions about them, which is a stance I support. Passionately. But is any child of any age old enough for such discussions? Was it censorial of me to be stunned when I found Zehn kleine Negerlein lying around in a Berlin pre-school in 2010?

Die Zeit insists that if we revise anything that is in any way offensive, then we must revise everything. (Which will lead to a ban on any disagreeable characters who are female or black or gay or disabled… ) This could be true if we were talking about bringing the law into it, but we’re not. As far as the law is concerned, anyone is free to adapt any artwork once granted permission by the copyright holder. Otfried Preußler’s publisher began replacing the N-word from his texts after receiving approval from the author’s daughter. As hard as it may be for artists to swallow, artwork in the public domain is free to be toyed with as anyone sees fit. Almost every generation releases the classics with new illustrations, whether it’s The Jungle Book or a children’s Bible.

But to be fair, the modern illustrations bear the name of the modern illustrator, while a redacted version of an author’s text bears his. Which feels somewhat mendacious. Posthumous revisions would best be noted in an afterword discussing the original language and why the publisher does not wish to replicate it. Alternatively, the cover could indicate that the story is a retelling. Like so many of my friends, I grew up on abridged versions of Victorian classics such as Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland. Only a handful of us went on to read the original texts when we were older. Just as we went on to discover the original versions of “Eeeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and the stanzas in the German national anthem that no one sings anymore.

We should never seek to erase our xenophobic heritage – on the contrary, it is something we must own up to and learn from. But it is no more appropriate for a young child to learn about Little Black Sambo than it is for them to learn about the rape version of Sleeping Beauty. (Or the most graphic Mother Goose rhymes. Or old television cartoons like these.) She will be ready to hear it at some point. Unfortunately, pinpointing the right point, the right moment, the right age will always be a problem. Because racism is a problem.

Though it often can be the best way to get a message across, art complicates politics because it mixes matters of taste with matters of justice. One lends itself to reason, the other doesn’t. Too often sentimental feelings about a film or song with offensive elements will result in fans denying the offense altogether. “Little House on the Prairie isn’t racist! I grew up on it and I turned out fine!” Maybe you did thanks to your innate curiosity about the experiences of others or inspiring teachers in your life, but you didn’t learn anything valuable about civil rights from that book. I grew up on Dumbo and I think it is an artistically brilliant film with many good messages, one of which is the problem of lookism. However, getting a white actor to put on his best black voice to play a character named “Jim Crow” in the heyday of the minstrel shows was a supremely stupid idea. We shouldn’t deny ourselves our personal tastes, but that shouldn’t preclude calling out the artists’ mistakes.

Likewise, we shouldn’t cry wolf over artwork that simply doesn’t match our tastes. I’m one of the few people on earth who doesn’t enjoy The Lord of the Rings—I saw it for the first time in my twenties and fell asleep—but that’s primarily because I get bored by fantasy epics that are predominantly serious. (I’m not wild about The Chronicles of Narnia either. If there’s going to be magic, I prefer the tongue-in-cheek tone maintained in the worlds of Roald Dahl, L. Frank Baum or the Pirates of the Caribbean.) It is sometimes difficult to divorce my dislike of the style from my annoyance that the Lord of the Rings definition of a dwarf receives more attention in almost every corner of our culture than the one based on reality. Google “dwarf” right now in the image search and see how long you have to wait until a real human being is featured. But neither Peter Jackson nor J. R. R. Tolkien is solely responsible for this; the latter of course drew this definition from the fantasy tradition. And the use of dwarfs in fantasy is not always problematic.

Peter Dinklage has demonstrated that dwarfism is no more important than skin color or foot size in Game of Thrones. And while I couldn’t sit through Lord of the Rings as an adult, I have a special place in my heart for the 1988 film Willow, which was panned by almost every critic I respect. Perhaps my nostalgia and childhood crush on Warwick Davis blinds me to the film’s artistic faults, but my enjoyment of it was rooted in politics before I even knew the word “politics.” Because for once a dwarf was the main character. And he looked like a real dwarf; he wasn’t wearing any pointed ears or goblin nose or orange face-paint. And I wanted to be Sorsha, the bad-ass warrior princess. Yes, she’s a damsel in distress during the final battle, but it’s 3′ 6″ Warwick Davis who wins that battle for her, not buff Val Kilmer.

While I’m uncomfortable with fantasy’s tradition of insisting that dwarfs are a separate race and thus, in many cases, non-human, I loved Willow for giving both the dwarf-sized people and the average-sized people names free of connotation (“nelwyns” and “dakinis”). They are neutral words that demonstrate one of the advantages of neologisms. (Though I’ll admit the film’s line “Stupid dakini!” has echoed in my head at various points in my life.) The film also uses the fictional word “peck” as the thinly veiled equivalent to “midget,” an insult the eponymous character must endure from dakinis throughout the film, adding more gravitas to his saving the day and personal appeal to dwarf viewers like myself. Too often in fantasy, physical characteristics are indicative of personality traits. This is an occasionally racist, always lookist device that disenfranchises hideous hags, macho musclemen, dark demons, pretty princesses, and innocent invalids. Willow offers a welcome respite. As sappy and as simple as the message is—anyone can be a hero—it bears repeating.

Speaking of lookist, I also adored Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as a kid. I always played Snow White, of course—what child doesn’t imagine themselves as the attention-getting protagonist?—but I was also secretly proud that the first feature-length animated film, one of the most famous of the Grimms’ fairy tales, included dwarfs who weren’t ludicrously unrealistic. They were kind, they had no mysticism and, as much as I loved her and her poufy dress, they had far more personality than Snow White herself. For these reasons, I didn’t mind using them as an example when children asked me about my size. My mother once said, “We’ll write to Disney and tell them most dwarfs aren’t bashful or dopey at all!” I recall at the time wishing she wouldn’t put a damper on a film I loved so much, but now I am grateful to her for fostering such moral vigilance in me.

Because once I hit puberty, I instantly saw the problems. Like Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and scores of other films, Snow White asserts that male characters who are disabled or deformed can never hope to get the girl. Considered innocent, asexual people, they are doomed to the Friend Zone. And women with disabilities? There aren’t many fairy tales about them. The story emphasizes even in Snow White’s name that looks are everything.

My childhood in combination with my experience with dwarfism endowed me with a nostalgia for stories I nevertheless was forced to analyze critically as I grew up, so I cannot deny either. Everyone should keep a healthy distance between one’s understanding of the world and fairy tales. My partner and I used the above image of Snow White on our wedding invitations, although we changed the slogan to “Everyone Is Beautiful”—a lesson I did not learn from Snow White herself, but from learning how my dwarfism conflicted with her.